University College, "the Hall of the University," may undoubtedly claim with justice to be the earliest University endowment. But it was at one time convenient to that College, in the course of a lawsuit in which their case was a losing one, to claim, when forgeries failed them, to be a royal foundation. The Alfred myth was to hand, and they used it with unblushing effrontery and a confident disregard of historical facts and dates. Their impudence for the time being fulfilled its purpose, and it also left its mark on the minds of men. The tradition still lingers. The College Chapel was dedicated at the end of the fourteenth century to S. Cuthbert, Durham's Saint, but the seventeenth-century Bidding Prayer still perpetuates the venerable fiction, and first among the benefactors of the "College of the great Hall of the University," the name of King Alfred is cited. In 1872 the College even celebrated, by the English method of a dinner, the supposed thousandth anniversary of its existence. At that dinner the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Robert Lowe (Lord Sherbrooke), wittily upheld the tradition of his College. For, he argued, if Oxford was in the hands of the Danes at the time when Alfred founded the University, that fact only strengthened their case. For King Alfred was a man so much in advance of his age that it is not surprising to find that he had anticipated the modern political doctrine, which teaches us that the surest way to earn popularity, is to give away the property of our opponents. [Illustration: University College] The story of the lawsuit will be found to be instructive if discreditable. In 1363 the College by two purchases obtained possession of considerable property in land and houses which had been the estate of Philip Gonwardy and Joan his wife. After the College had been in possession some fourteen years, however, a certain Edmund Francis and Idonea his wife came forward to dispute the right to it. They maintained that Philip Gonwardy and his wife had had no true title to the estate, for it, or part of it, had been bequeathed to them by one John Goldsmith in 1307. And he, they asserted, had by a later document settled the same property upon them. The case was tried at Westminster; transferred to Oxford, where the College obtained a verdict in their favour, and then taken back on appeal to Westminster. It was at this point that the document known as the French petition--it is written in the Court French of the day--was filed. Finding, apparently, that the case was going against them, the College determined to use the myth about Alfred, claim to be a royal foundation and thus throw the matter, and their liberties along with it, into the King's hands, leaving the case to be decided by the Privy Council.